1,050 yards confirmed kill by USMC sniper

"' Our (company commander) told us to go find where the mortars were coming from and take them out so we went back out,' remembered Hancock. 'We moved south some more and linked up with the rear elements of our first platoon. Then we got up on a building and scanned across the river. We looked out of the spot scope and saw about three to five insurgents manning a 120mm mortar tube. We got the coordinates for their position and set up a fire mission. We decided that when the rounds came in that I would engage them with the sniper rifle. We got the splash and there were two standing up looking right at us. One had a black (outfit) on. I shot and he dropped. Right in front of him another got up on his knees looking to try and find out where we were so I dropped him too. After that our mortars just hammered the position, so we moved around in on them.'

The subsequent fire for effect landed right on the insurgent mortar position.

'We adjusted right about fifty yards where there were two other insurgents in a small house on the other side of the position,' said Flowers. 'There was some brush between them and the next nearest building about 400 yards south of where they were at and we were about 1,000 yards from them so I guess they thought we could not spot them. Some grunts were nearby with binoculars but they could not see them, plus they are not trained in detailed observation the way we are. We know what to look for such as target indicators and things that are not easy to see.'

Hancock and Flowers then scanned several areas that they expected fire from, but the enemy mortars had silenced.

'After we had called in indirect fire and after all the adjustments from our mortars, I got the final 8-digit grid coordinates for the enemy mortar position, looked at our own position using GPS and figured out the distance to the targets we dropped to be 1,050 yards,' said Flowers with a grin. 'This time we were killing terrorism from more than 1,000 yards.'